Re-Writing Trent, or What Happened to Italian Literature in the Wake ...

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numerous competing „clean‟ editions; and that the process was so lengthy and onerous that on occasion publication was hugely delayed or abandoned as a result. 40 Censors had little care for the integrity of the original text, and while a prose text might survive a censorial battering with some shreds of its original character intact (Castiglione‟s Libro del cortegiano is an interesting case here 41 ), a poetic text would inevitably be much more vulnerable to wrecking. Thus expurgation remains a thorny issue and one that scholars have not to date managed adequately to take account of. The existence of sources such as, for example, a large archive of expurgated and unpublished works in the Archivio Arcivescovile in Florence, helps to illustrate the widespread nature of a practice that was seemingly scarcely documented or controlled. 42 Given the time wasting and nit picking that could be undergone as a text moved slowly towards print publication through the various censorial mechanisms, a reasonably problem-free solution was to eschew print publication altogether, and opt instead for other means of dissemination. While there has been a tendency in the past to assume that after the advent of print scribal culture was effectively swept to one side in Italy, recent work has shown definitively that this was not the case. 43 An important new avenue for scribal publication and oral dissemination grew up within the burgeoning academies in the later sixteenth century, which did not cater solely to social elites but reached a relatively wide cross section of society, and provided an ideal forum for sharing and passing on literary 40 See Fragnito, ‘Central and Peripheral Organization’, pp.36-49. 41 On the censoring of the Libro del cortegiano, see Vittorio Cian, ‘Un episodio della storia della censura in Italia nel secolo XVI. L’edizione spurgata del Cortegiano’, Archivio storico lombardo, 14 (1887), 661-727. 42 On this archive, see Michel Plaisance, ‘Littérature et censure à Florence à la fin du XVIe siècle: le retour du censuré’, in Le pouvoir et la plume. Incitation, contrôle et répression dans l’italie du XVIe siècle. Actes du Colloque international organisé par le Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Renaissance italienne et l’Institut Culturel Italien de Marseille: Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, 14-16 mai 1981 (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982), pp.233-52. 43 Most recently, Brian Richardson, Manuscript Culture in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Antonio Corsaro, ‘Manuscript Collections of Spiritual Poetry in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in Forms of Faith, pp.33-56; and on the English context, Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 14
works without undue meddling by the church authorities. 44 The members of the Accademia degli Alterati in Florence, as one example, were very engaged with the dissemination of texts, receiving them from members and also from outsiders to read and discuss. 45 While this may to some extent have functioned as a form of pre-print vetting by a trusted peer group on the part of authors, it was not only this, as many authors did not aspire to eventual print publication. Likewise Academic discussions and lectures, both public and private, provided a forum for oral dissemination that could potentially reach wide audiences, as is the case with the public lectures organised by the Accademia Fiorentina, for example. 46 As Brian Richardson has made clear in his recent study, such scribal and oral dissemination in academic contexts allowed for the open-ended transmission of texts from network to network (from one academy to another via individuals, for example) across surprisingly large geographical areas. Sometimes the endpoint of the journey was a printing press, whether with or without the author‟s permission, but it also frequently led to further manuscript dissemination, operating at one remove from the Indexes. 47 The scribal dissemination of poetic texts was common practice at all stages of the composition process, operating both inside and outside the context of the Academies. Poets shared their texts for various reasons, seeking feedback from fellow practitioners on work-in- progress, or releasing texts to carefully circumscribed audiences, sometimes allowing them to be copied and recirculated further afield or presented as gifts to friends or patrons. Currents of scribal communication informed the practice of lyric poetry throughout the sixteenth 44 Richardson, Manuscript Culture, pp.48-52. 45 On the Alterati see Bernard Weinberg, ‘Argomenti di discussione letteraria nell’Accademia degli Alterati (1570-1600)’, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 131 (1954), 175-94; and id., ‘The Accademia degli Alterati and Literary Taste from 1570 to 1600’, Italica, 31 (1954), 207-14. 46 See Michel Plaisance, ‘Les leçons publiques et privées de l’Academie Florentine (1541-1552), in Les commentaires et la naissance de la critique littéraire. France/Italie (XIVe-XVIe siècles). Actes du colloque international sur le commentaire, Paris, mai 1988, ed. Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani and Michel Plaisance (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1990), pp.113-21; Judith Bryce, ‘The oral world of the early Accademia Fiorentina’, Renaissance Studies, 9 (1995), 77-103. 47 Richardson, Manuscript Culture, pp.46-52. 15
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